Exploring Rural Household's Adoption of SSTs (Self Service Technologies) with Special Reference to ATM's in Banking Industry

Afterthe advent of self-service technologies, there has been a great shift in the way customers interact with the service providers. Any change is not considered worth unless it is usable, understandable and finally adoptable by the user (Dix 2001). It is a challenging and daunting task to educate and convince a customer to get used to the newer technologies that facilitate faster transactions, provide cost advantages to service provider. Many banking organizations at one point of time highlighted their SST capability as USPs for e.g.: Canara bank was the first to release mobile ATMs in India and SBI also daimed that it has the largest number of ATMs in India. Technological change can happen any time, in any form as it is imminent. If an organization doesn't accept change, then it may end up being the architect of its own decaying incompetent business model. Whenever an innovation yields its' advantages should be disseminated and awareness has to be created so that anxiety and skepticism should not find their place in the minds of people (Langer and Saegert, 1977). When companies introduce self service technologies, they have greater challenge of communicating, comforting the consumer to accept the change. At the same time they should be able to successfully measure attitudes, behavioral intentions of people towards the technologies and focus on educating the segments that are not comfortable in using self-service technologies. This paper stands as window opener to analyze consumer adoption of self-service technologies by a concepbual model of attitude development by Davis, Bagozzi D Fred and Warshaw. Also this paper discussses installation of SSTs in rural areas and alternatives to extract more response to adopt SST have also been stressed.